"Not Art expresses itself through an extended football metaphor, but it sweeps wide through national and continental culture and burrows deep into the author's psyche (and, of course, his mother's). (...) What is absolutely apparent is his linguistic gusto, his exuberance, his sheer joy in using language to achieve his purpose. (...) There is never a leaden moment in this novel, which resembles quicksilver in its mercurial liquidity as it flows on, lighting up his distinctive universe." - Martin Rubin, The Los Angeles Times

"Esterhazy’s words tumble out and leap around as if uttered by someone with no time to draw breath. Packed with references to his previous works and to Hungarian cultural history, politics and sporting greats, as well as wildly diverse musings (on the size of "gun-howitzers" or why Hungary’s mafia is Albanian), Not Art is tough to navigate" - Alison McCulloch, The New York Times Book Review

"Esterházy can be searing (.....) And he has a gift for slapstick (.....) But passages larded with intertextual allusions are challenging for an Anglophone reader, despite the translator’s meticulous footnotes." - The New Yorker

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Not Art is yet another 'novel' by Esterházy Péter anchored -- very much so -- in fact and personal experience.
There's a great deal of personal history worked through here, mainly about Esterházy and his parents, and especially about his mother.
He notes it's territory fraught with danger:

Families that get caught up in literature don't have an easy time of it; for one thing, they resent being caught up to begin with, then they resent if what's on the page accords with the facts, what they consider the facts, and also, if they don't accord with the facts.

Esterházy's account is certainly ... forthright; it is also, in the best sense, reflectively personal.
Naturally, it's subjective (and it's noteworthy how often opinions are mentioned: soccer (football) is central to the book, for example, and opinions on offer run the gamut from: "My mother didn't like my football book; as a matter of fact, she generally disliked books about football to begin with", to the fact that, as far as his father was concerned, "tennis was the only legitimate ball game").
Esterházy allows -- in a typical passage -- that:

But ever since I can remember, there is someone watching inside me, I'm not saying an Other, an Other that's me, of course -- From Sartre to Imre Kertész the literature is replete with such things.
My watchful self -- a joke: nomen est omen ! -- kept watching and watching and saw and accepted of the world only and exclusively what it had seen.
In short, it wanted to re-create the world.

Not Art is such a work of re-creation, memories and anecdotes revisited and interpreted.
It's hardly a traditional account or even fiction, but rather a loose yet interconnected collection, heavy on the 1950s, with Hungary's glorious football team of those times, and it's rather more inglorious political situation.
There are twelve chapters, each further divided into short sections, and the narrative meanders along, back and forth and around.
Soccer (football), and his mother's relationship to it, is a starting point of sorts -- though:

When I made up my mind to write my mother's story, her amazing but certainly highly unconventional relationship to soccer, I had no idea that I would have a story of my own that would merge into this (that like a babbling brook to a mountain stream I would hasten to my mother's bosom -- but let's not exaggerate).

One detects -- here and throughout -- Esterházy's winks to the reader: surely that his own story would be (e)merging here, too, was obvious to him from the start (as, indeed, his own story finds a prominent place throughout all his works).
The soccer parts -- especially the Puskás-veneration (though it is Bozsik that was mom's favorite) -- are good fun (though some familiarity with the great team probably helps), right down to the name-changing details (since the district comrade complained: "we got a bunch of Swabs, the entire defense in fact is Swab to the last man" -- problematic since the Swabian names were distinctly German rather than 'Hungarian').
And Esterházy is a true and knowledgeable fan (and, in a book filled with literary allusions and mentions, gives a nod to Toussaint's Zidane-book(let), among so many others).
The family portraits, too, are well-done, from the broken father to the more extensive portrayal of the mother -- though it is Esterházy, trying to place and find himself in these contexts, that remains the dominant figure in this first-person account.
The writing often seems unchecked -- right down to such odd flights of fancy as:

How big is a gun-howitzer ?
The size of a cow, I bet.
Though it probably gives less milk.
Besides, how could I haul it up here ?
If cows could fly, it would clearly be a cinch.

Much of the appeal of the book comes in this dizzying word- and thought-play, but the translation has a hard time keeping up: it's a valiant effort, and, for the most part, the result is satisfying enough, but some of the thickets are too tangled.
The many footnotes, however, are very useful -- and make clear how much Esterházy builds on what he's read, as opposed to merely what he's experienced and remembers.
To take only the most blatant examples: as one note mentions, Esterházy "once copied out the manuscript of [Géza] Ottlik's classical novel School at the Frontier by hand", and Esterházy himself gives a nod to the "lots of Handke quotes" that (controversially) found their way into an earlier book of his dealing with his mother's death.
'Not Art', the title would have it, but Not Art is, in fact, all art, pushing the fictional envelope (while also fully embracing and leaning on the traditions of fiction).
Writing with tremendous facility, Esterházy does not present a straightforward text, but Not Art offers many of the usual -- and some surprising and unusual -- rewards of fiction.
It can be hard to keep a grasp on it, much less not lose the overview -- but Esterházy's deceptively welcoming (often comic, always fluent and clever) writing makes the reading experience a pleasure almost despite itself.